Is there anything I can do outside of training to help equip my employees for customer service?
Customer service is an area in which it pays to have good relationships with your employees. If they have problems with customers, encourage them to come to you rather than take it out on the customer.
Train your employees well and then assure them that you trust them to treat customers appropriately. When frustrated customers ask to speak to you rather than your employees, listen to the customer, but also guard against assuming that the employee is in the wrong. If customer service employees trust you, they won’t feel threatened by a customer who wants to speak with you rather than them.
It is also very important to trust your employees with responsibility in dealing with companies. One major hotel chain empowers every employee to spend a few hundred dollars to compensate individual guests for errors. A major airline has a policy of allowing some employees to bend the rules to meet customer needs. Restaurants offer free meals if your food is incorrect or was too slow in coming. In all these cases, customers who entered a situation very frustrated leave with a good taste in their mouths. Make it a rule to allow rule-bending when it comes to the customers.
Above all, model good customer service yourself. If employees see you treating customers poorly—or even worse, treating them kindly and then badmouthing them privately later—bad attitudes and habits will develop. Customer service training is done not only at a one-time seminar but every day at the workplace.